3

To give an example:

One of the more well known currently disputed territories is Crimea. As telecommunication services, and users of such, do continue to operate from that territory under the aegis of a Russian persona, (like a Crimean based website using a .ru domain or personal and business phones in Crimea using a Russian country code), does acceptance of such communication imply recognizing the territory as part of Russia?

To me it seems a bit tricky because in the ordinary sense the answer would be of course. It would be silly to accept a phone call, carry on a conversation, then refuse to accept the first few digits of the phone number.

If this norm holds then the communication operators and their receivers are recognizing identifying claims. However, in this case that would mean accepting that Crimea is no longer part of Ukraine. And governments are receivers of communication too.

(There does not seem to exist technical means to block the propogation of such communication. And it also may not even be possible, for internet companies specifically, to refuse recognition of any technically valid domain without jeopardizing their interconnections.)

M. Y. Zuo
  • 352
  • 1
  • 10

3 Answers3

8

No

Recognition of territorial claims is the sole province of the diplomatic branches of national government, and of heads of state. In the US it is the State Department, and ultimately the President. The actions of telephone operators and people engaging in other forms of communication cannot and do not bind the decisions of the President, or of other heads of state.

Besides, there may be cases in which a telephone country code or a web domain may not match the actual, undisputed legal status of a territory. Accepting a phone call does not affect a country's legal status.

For decades the US did not recognize the communist regime in China. Legally, it considered that the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) was the only valid government, and the acceptance of telephone calls did not change that.

David Siegel
  • 115,406
  • 10
  • 215
  • 408
7

No

As a matter of international law, each country is free to accept or reject the territorial claims (and even the existence) of every other country.

Many nations do not recognize Russia’s claims over Crimea - it doesn’t change the facts on the ground. Similarly, many countries recognize China’s claims over Formosa (Taiwan), or the Palestinian claims of statehood - that also doesn’t change the facts.

Neither does accepting mail.

Dale M
  • 237,717
  • 18
  • 273
  • 546
5

Your question conflates "recognizing the existence of a territory/organization/state" and "recognizing the geographical boundaries of a territory/organization/state."

Your example is "a Crimean based website using a .ru domain." I don't see any difference between "a Crimean based website using a .ru domain" and, say, "a U.S.-based website using an .io domain" (like, e.g., my blog hosted on github.io). I live in the U.S. and maintain a website in the .io domain; that doesn't even remotely suggest that the U.S. is physically part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

You also seem to be worried about some sort of magic-words trap where someone could say "Aha, you visited www.unitedstates.io, therefore you are legally bound to recognize that the United States is part of the Indian Ocean Territory!"

Likewise, if certain people located physically in Crimea happen to run websites under .ru, that doesn't mean that Crimea is physically part of Russia; and if you happen to visit www.crimea.ru, that doesn't imply any kind of legal agreement that Crimea is (or is not) part of Russia.

Getting back to the conflation... There is definitely more of an argument to be made that the existence of the .ru TLD implies that someone, somewhere, recognizes the existence of Russia. However, as Jörg W Mittag pointed out in the comments, domain-name TLDs are more or less based on the two-letter abbreviations maintained by the U.N.'s Statistics Division, and the U.N.'s Statistics Division very clearly states:

The designations employed and the presentation of material at this site do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

This doesn't directly address your concerns about phone-number country codes, but I can't imagine any reason for the logic and rationales re: phone numbers to "work" any differently from the logic and rationales expressed above re: TLDs.

UPDATE: @MichaelZ, from your comments below, I surmise that you don't really get how DNS works. When you direct your browser to (let's say) www.crimea.ru, all that happens is that your computer looks up that name in a big distributed "phone book," starting at the top ("at the root") and then descending: you ask the root "What's the IP address of www.crimea.ru?" and the root says "I don't know, but on the subject of .ru domains, I trust a.dns.ripn.net, whose IP address is 193.232.128.6." So then your computer asks 193.232.128.6 "What's the IP address of www.crimea.ru?" and 193.232.128.6 says "I don't know, but on the subject of .crimea.ru domains, I trust ns1.ht-systems.ru, whose IP address is 78.110.50.60." So then your computer asks 78.110.50.60 "What's the IP address of www.crimea.ru?" and 78.110.50.60 says "Oh, that's 78.110.50.130." So then your computer sends an HTTP GET request (or whatever you're interested in doing) to 78.110.50.130. If it's HTTP or HTTPS, it'll also send some header data that basically says "Hello 78.110.50.130! A little bird told me you were www.crimea.ru; is that right?"

There's a lower level, "IP" (Internet Protocol), that handles the routing of packets to these various IP addresses. In a sense, the Internet Protocol "recognizes" the relationship between certain IP blocks and certain geographical regions of the Earth. However, it does not recognize political boundaries; there's no concept of an IP address saying "I am Russian" in the same way that a domain name could say "I am Russian (.ru)." (And, again, a domain name can "say" it's Russian only in the same sense that it can "say" it's the Indian Ocean; that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on geographical reality.)

Anyway, does this help clarify why none of this technology stuff has any bearing on geographical or political boundaries?

Ryan M
  • 10,374
  • 2
  • 47
  • 63
Quuxplusone
  • 166
  • 3